Love Bytes

Insights on Our Deepest Desire

John Buri is Professor of Psychology at the University of St. Thomas and the author of How To Love Your Wife. See full bio

February 10, 2009, Happiness

The Bachelor

Is It Important To Be In Love In Order To Be Happy?

Based upon your experience with love, is the following statement True or False? "It is important for people's happiness to be in love." [Do you have your answer?]

When I do talks / workshops for single men and women, this is a question that I sometimes ask. It is actually one of the questions that can be used to figure out whether people are likely to get themselves into messy relationships in their love lives. We all want to be happy, and when we think that love is a prerequistire to that happiness, then it stands to reason that we are probably going to end up with some love experiences that are not too healthy.

Imagine that a person is really, really thirsty, and a glass of water shows up. Would that person drink it? Most people would. And if they were thirsty enough, they probably wouldn't be very discriminating about the quality of the water they were choosing to drink --- satisfaction of the thirst is all that matters.

I know a young woman whose father left the family when she was 10. She spent much of her adolescence struggling with this loss and the sadness that came with it, and once she started dating, she hoped to find someone who would somehow take care of that sadness she was feeling in her life. She believed that it was in love that she would find the happiness that she so desparately wanted. It was as if she was very thirsty and she was hoping that love would satisfy the thirst. Unfortunately, in an effort to quench her thirst, she was not very discriminating, and she went through a string of unhealthy dating partners. By the time I met her when she was a junior in college, she was convinced that all men are jerks. I have tried to help her see that not all men are jerks, just the ones she had gotten involved with out of her desire to be loved. She is now working to change her belief that her happiness is dependent upon being in love.

Did you see the television program The Bachelor last week? [If you can handle large groups of women fawning over one man, this program can provide a fairly entertaining and enlightening look at human behavior in the fishbowl of rating / dating / mating.] On The Bachelor, Stephanie did not get a rose (in other words, she was eliminated from the competition for the bachelor, Jason). As Stephanie was driving away in the limo, she commented that it has been nearly four years since her husband died and that she has bounced back quite well. She went on to say that she is living an enjoyable and satisfying life, and that she had participated on The Bachelor with the thought that maybe Jason would want to share with her in that enjoyable and satisfying life.

Valentine's Day can be an especially tough time of year for people who are not in a love relationship, but who believe that happiness and love are intricately tied together. I suspect that Stephanie will be just fine this Valentine's Day.